Quick! Name that movie. If you said Casablanca, give yourself a big pat on the back. Did you know that the line, "Play it again, Sam." is actually a misquotation? The original line is, "Play it once, Sam, for old times' sake." A little trivia for those of you who like that sort of thing. ;)
So welcome back to day 2. I'm so glad so many of you stopped by yesterday, and even more excited to share my process of how I create mini albums with you today and throughout the rest of the week.
Ready to get started?
Let's play a little game, shall we? I'll show you a couple of mini albums, and you see if you can spot how they're alike.
Mini Album #1 (Places We've Called Home)
Mini Album #2 (My, How You've Grown!)
What did you see? Did you notice the following?
- One page of journaling, one page is photo-only
- Both use repetitive elements on each spread
- Both albums are small -- only a handful of pages
There's no magic formula here. All I've done in each of these albums is to create a single recipe and re-use it again and again, changing an element here or there on occasion, until my album is complete.
Take a closer look at the "Places We've Called Home" album. At the time I created this mini album, I had just brought home the cutest little chipboard pieces from FontWerks. The scallop circle and the house chipboard spoke to me, and I just knew I needed to use them in a project! In this case, my album topic was actually inspired by the product. Knowing that I wanted to highlight the little house, I decided to create a mini-album to share the details of the many places Mike and I had already called home.
Once the topic of my album had been decided, I found one element that I wanted to use as my focal point, and created a double-page layout based on this element. The element I chose was the scallop circle which in the following page layouts translated to the circle journaling block. Once I had the first page layout designed, the rest of the album came together in a snap! I completed this album in less than a few hours, thanks to a little recipe re-using.
Here's the recipe (a.k.a "sketch") I used in creating my pages:
You can see I changed the left-hand side a bit to work for my introduction page, and used only the right-hand side of the recipe for my cover. You certainly don't have to stick to a recipe like glue! The point is that having one makes creating the album easier and faster because you don't have to spend time deciding the layout of your pages. For me, this is a total plus. I'm limited on time and attention-span, so the less energy I have to spend on those elements the more time and energy I have to spend on the journaling, choosing cutesy papers and, best of all thumbing through my final product!
Now before I forget, remember the commenter who asked about acrylic albums? I've only created one acrylic album, ever. I created it a few summers ago after a trip to the Washington Coast. Here it is below.
I had absolutely no idea how I was going to create my cover on acrylic, until a friend suggested using Staz On and rubons (stamps, rubons and label here are FontWerks, as well). I was a little wary at first, because I only had the one album, and there was no room for error. She was right! Staz On worked, much to my surprise, and the rubon idea... genius!
Now, if you're wondering if I used a recipe on this album, you're right! Maybe I'll share the inside pages later in the week.
Now that I've got you thinking about recipes, how about another little download? This is a recipe of a different kind. In fact, it's one of my favorite summertime side-dish recipes.
And if you're like me, and you like to print things out, here's the download. :)
Download Beancornsaladrecipe
Come back tomorrow for a step-by-step look at how I created this mini-album.
Sneaky, aren't I? And if you're hanging out waiting for a challenge, that will come tomorrow as well.
Until then, happy Tuesday!
